Six Canadian medallists from Sochi will compete in Pyeongchang, but the biggest favourites are Mikael Kingsbury and Justine Dufour-Lapointe

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It’s impossible to know whether an Olympic gold medal consumes Mikael Kingsbury’s thoughts. We can only go by what he tells us.

There’s the oft-told story from the lead-up to the 2014 Olympics about the sign he put on his ceiling as a kid, with the Olympic rings and the statement, “I will win.”

All he has done is win. The freestyle moguls skier from Deux-Montagnes, Que., is without peer on the World Cup circuit, where he has won 28 of the 38 events held since the last Olympics in Sochi in 2014. He recently had a 13-event winning streak from Feb. 2, 2017 through Jan. 11 of this year. It was snapped Jan. 20 — at the final pre-Olympic event at Tremblant in his home province — when he finished 0.61 points behind Ikuma Horishima of Japan.

He started skiing the World Cup events at 17, the autumn after the Vancouver Olympics. From a 54th-place finish in his debut, he was on the top step of the podium for the first time three months later. He was on the podium in 35 of the 47 World Cup events leading up to Sochi and was a favourite to extend his mastery the biggest stage.

But he hadn’t been to an Olympic Games before, and teammate Alexandre Bilodeau had. Bilodeau, the reigning champion from Vancouver, performed on the day, edging Kingsbury into second place to become the first to repeat as Olympic champion in any freestyle skiing event.

“That’s the best I can do,” Bilodeau said post-race. “I’m going to leave that guy (Kingsbury) because he’s pushing the sport and next year, he’s going to be crazy. I’m not following that.”

Said Kingsbury: “I made a mistake and you learn from your mistake and you don’t make the same mistakes twice. I’ll come back stronger.”

Even better over the last four years, now he’ll arrive in Pyeonchang with the weight of those expectations again. Kingsbury now owns 12 crystal globes — six as the overall World Cup champion and six as the moguls season champion — but he doesn’t yet have that Olympic gold medal. In an interview with Postmedia over the summer, he was preaching the sports-psychology mantra that all the best athletes work to imbed in their brain. Because that’s how they cope with the pressure.

“It’s important for me. It keeps me very motivated but I’m not going into Pyeongchang only thinking about the gold medal,” he said. “I want to think about myself and being able to ski the run of my life as usual. There’s a little process, and I just want to follow what I need to do, and arrive and peak at the right moment. I know if I ski my best, I will put myself in a very good position to win. And my ultimate goal in Pyeongchang is to cross the line and scream and know that I did everything I could. I just want to be happy when I cross the line. If I do that then I’ve controlled what I can control.”

Three becomes two: The Dufour-Lapointe sisters were a big storyline in Sochi — all three made the Olympic team in moguls and Justine, then just 19, edged out Chloe, the 22-year-old, for the gold medal. They held hands on the podium and new stars were born. Maxime, then 25, made it through the first two stages of the final and finished 12th. The Montreal natives all remained on the World Cup circuit pointing toward Pyeongchang, but Maxime hit a bump in the road last season. She had back and hip surgeries in May and her recovery this season has been slow, which meant she wasn’t named to the Olympic team.

Even Justine and Chloe might not be the Canadian medal favourites in South Korea. Andi Naude, a 22-year-old from Penticton, B.C., is second in the World Cup standings this season thanks to a string of consistent performances from which she has four podiums and she has yet to finish outside the top six. Justine, who is sixth in the standings, has only two podiums but she broke through with her first victory in the final event in Tremblant on Jan. 20.

Chloe Dufour-Lapointe, left, and Justine Dufour-Lapointe ham it up at the announcement of the Canadian freestyle ski team for the 2018 Winter Olympics on Jan. 22, 2018 in Montreal.

It’s not all up to judges: Four of the five freestyle skiing events, three of the four snowboard events, ski jumping and nordic combined all have an element of judging that decides the final outcome. How much judging makes up the final tally in each discipline?

— Freestyle skiing • Aerials: This is 100 per cent judged. An air score counts for 20 per cent, form is 50 per cent and landing is 30 per cent. • Halfpipe and slopestyle: Both follow the same scoring concept. A single mark out of 100 is given by each judge based on five criteria — amplitude (height plus control), trick difficulty, trick variety, execution and linkage between tricks. • Moguls: Judging components account for 80 per cent of the score — 60 per cent for turns down the course and 20 per cent for the jumps.

— Snowboard • Big air: There are only four components to this 100-point score here — difficulty, execution, amplitude and landing. • Halfpipe: The snowboard version follows the ski version of scoring. • Slopestyle: Individual trick scores make up 60 per cent of final mark; 40 per cent goes to an overall impression for final score out of 100. The same five elements as ski halfpipe, and ski and snowboard slopestyle are considered.

— Ski jumping Five judges award a maximum of 20 points for each jump. The highest and lowest are thrown out, leaving a maximum of 60 judging points for each jump. Kamil Stoch of Poland, the 2014 Olympic champion on both the normal and large hill, earned 41 per cent of his final score from the judges. The rest of made up of a distance score and points adjustments for the start gate location and the wind.

— Nordic combined Competitors in this event have a cross-country ski leg and a ski jumping leg that combines for their final result. The same ski jumping scoring rules apply.

Most likely to win gold: Six Canadian medallists from these events in Sochi will compete in Pyeongchang, but Kingsbury and Justine Dufour-Lapointe would be at the top of the list.

Keep an eye out for Cassie Sharpe, the ski halfpipe specialist from Comox, B.C., who has had a breakout season in 2017-18. She is currently third on the World Cup circuit, won a Dew Tour superpipe event in December and earned a bronze at the invitation-only Winter X Games on Jan. 25 despite breaking her thumb — which was already in a splint from an earlier break — in her first run.

Most anticipated event: Men’s snowboard slopestyle and big air. It will be the first time most Canadians get to see Mark McMorris, the 24-year-old world-class mountain-rider from the flatlands of Regina. Last March he crashed into a tree filming a backcountry run for a documentary and spent 10 days in the hospital with a score of injuries and broken bones. He’s back on the slopes now but didn’t have to push himself to make the Olympic team this winter since his spot was already assured.

“I went through a gnarly trauma. I think that the trauma can go one of two ways,” he told Postmedia’s Dan Barnes in August. “It can definitely bring you down and make life more difficult for a long time. But the fact that I was given another opportunity, I can wake up every day and know that it can be so, so, so much worse.”

McMorris will be seeking to improve on the bronze medal he won in Sochi in slopestyle. Big air is a new event for 2018 that he, Max Parrot, Seb Toutant and Tyler Nicholson will also compete in. McMorris announced his intentions with a silver medal in slopestyle at the Winter X Games. His teammate, Max Parrot, earned gold in big air there as well.

Having their best decade ever: Moguls in Canada. Starting with Jean-Luc Brassard’s gold medal back in 1992, the Canadians have been on the podium consistently since 2006, starting with Jenn Heil, then Bilodeau, and now Kinsgbury and the Dufour-Lapointes. “We’ve been the best team for 10 years and I think we’re going to be the best still for a little while,” Kingsbury said during the summer. “It’s fun because my teammates are my best friends and they’re the reason why I enjoy skiing so much. Going to a training camp or to compete, I’m excited to ski but I’m mostly excited to see my best buddies.”

Just get to the start line: Despite being judged sports, these events are relatively controversy-free. McMorris and the sport’s keenest observers were bewildered by the scores he received for his runs in Sochi, which relegated him to the bronze medal.

The biggest problem in Sochi was the slopestyle course. In pre-event training runs, athletes found the course too steep and dangerous. Torsten Horgmo of Norway, a six-time Winter X Games medallist in big air, broke his collarbone in a practice run. Organizers reworked the course to make it safer.

Keeping a lid on it: As freestyle skiing became more popular and its Olympic participation increased to five events from the original two (moguls and aerials), organizers created quotas to limit the number of athletes and to cap the number coming from the most dominant nations — basically, Canada and the U.S. In 2010, with the addition of ski-cross, a maximum of 180 athletes were allowed to compete and no country could have more than 18 team members across the three disciplines and no more than 10 of one sex.

Slopestyle and halfpipe were added for 2014 and the athlete total increased to 282 and the national quotas were increased to 26 (with a maximum of 14 from one sex). For the first time, the number of spots a nation had earned in each discipline could exceed 26, which meant having to parse your nomination list. Canada, for example, earned 33 spots based on its World Cup results but could only nominate 26 athletes to the Games in Sochi. That meant eliminating two spots in men’s aerials, and one each in men’s ski-cross and slopestyle, and women’s aerials, ski-cross and halfpipe. The U.S. had to eliminate eight earned spots. Those spots are then allocated to other nations. Russia and Kazakhstan ended up with four extra spots each.

There are similar quotas on the snowboard side — 26 per nation — but Canada only qualified for 21 spots for the 2018 Games. Only the U.S. reached the full allotment.

Opening the lid a little: This year, the total number of athletes is the same but the national quotas have been increased to 30. Canada will still have to give back five spots from what it earned through the World Cup, and the U.S. will give back three.

Winter sports are not just for winter: “Off-season training, it’s sort of a non-stop effort,” Naude says. “We usually only take about a month off of skiing every year. Other than that, there is no off-season really.

“We spend a ton of time on the trampoline, in the gym, on the bikes, water ramping, on snow — it really depends on the time of the year.”

The off-season is the time to work on the building blocks of your run — and to deal with the fears of these crazy tricks — so that it all comes together when the snow falls.

“There’s fear in our sport. And that’s something I kind of like in a sense because when you beat the fear … it’s a very cool moment to do that,” Lamarre says. “But then what’s cool now is we have air bags, water ramps, foam pits, so you can actually build your confidence up, and when you’re standing up on the snow, about to do it on snow, you’re like, ‘I know I can do it. I got this, it’s OK.’ And you gotta trust yourself and shut off and trust your muscle memory.”

“Definitely try not to think of the fact that we’re flipping three times 60 feet above the ground,” freestyle ski aerialist Lewis Irving said. “But it plays a factor when the weather’s off or whatever, it definitely gets stressful but it’s what we do everyday and you learn to deal with the stress factors.”

Dara Howell, left, and Kim Lamarre finished first and third in women’s freestyle skiing slopestyle at the 2014 Winter Games.

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